1838 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 

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Hollinger Corp. 
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1838 
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ADDRESS 



DELIVERED BEFORE THE 



ALUMNI ASSOCIATION 



COLLEGE OF NEW JERSEY. 



SEPTEMBER 26, 1838. 



BY JAMES M'DOWELL, ESQ. 

OF ROCKBRIDGE COUNTY, VIRGINIA. 



PRINCETON: 

PRINTED AND PUBLISHED BY JOHN BOGART. 



A z 



V 



College of New Jebsey, September 26th, 1838. 
James M'Dowell, Esq. 

Sir— At a meeting of the Alumni Association, held this day, it was unani- 
mously resolved, "that the thanks of the Association be presented to James 
M'Dowell, Esq. for the very eloquent Address delivered by him this day; and 
that he be requested to furnish a copy for publication." 

In communicating the above resolution, allow us to add the expression of our 
earnest hope that you will add to the obligations under which we already lie to 
you, a compliance with the request of the Association. 
With the highest esteem and respect, 
Your obedient servants, 

SAMUEL R. HAMILTON, ) 
ALBERT B. DOD, ( Committee. 

DAVID N. BOGART, \ 



PjtixcETox, September 27th, 1838. 

tjrESTTLEMEX 

The Address upon yesterday, for which, through you, I am now presented 
with the thanks of the Alumni Association is so much overpaid by this testimony 
of the kindness with which it was received, that I am only sorry you should have 
gone farther, and have requested me to lay it before another tribunal at the expense 
perhaps, of the discretion and the judgment of us both. Far better, as I am sure 
it would be, to commit it to the chronicle of kind recollections than to the sterner 
and more enduring one of the press, it shall nevertheless, be placed in your hands 
for publication as soon as it can be prepared for that purpose. In this, some una- 
voidable delay will occur, as well from the many liberties taken with the manuscript 
Address m the spoken one, as from some pressing out-door engagements which will 
occupy me for some days, but the least delay practicable will be permitted 

With my warmest and most respectful acknowledgments to the Association 
be pleased to accept individually, the expression of the sincere personal regard with 
which I am 

Your most obedient servant, 

JAMES M'DOWELL. 



ADDRESS. 



Mr. President, and Gentlemen of the Alumni Asso- 
ciation. 

Another anniversary has brought us together to 
renew, over a common altar, the sympathies and pledges 
of brotherhood, and to derive from the teachings of the 
past the lessons and the duties of the future. We are 
again met as members of the same academic household, 
to tell over, with all its moral, the story of separation 
and of life ; to revive the embers of early, if not 
decaying friendships ; to foster, by mutual indulgence, 
the grateful and glowing sentiment which here, at least, 
will always go forth in gratitude and in homage to the 
parent institution which rocked the cradle of our 
intellect, and blessed our boyhood by its care. We 
are again grouped and gathered from amidst the 
throngs and thoroughfares of the world into the family 
circle, to join our hearts and hands in the presence, 
and in prayer for the weal of its cherished and vene- 
rated head, and to carry hence, into all the dif- 
ferences which destiny or which opinion may esta- 
blish amongst us, that healing and kindly influence 
which flows from the cultivated sense of kindred and 
common obligation. The sons of this institution would 
be less than men if, quitting their habitations and their 



business, and assembling year after year upon this 
hallowed ground of their pastime and study, they could 
enter anew into the forgotten engrossments of their 
youth, and could have the faded memory of that ani- 
mated and ambitious but joyous period, with all its 
train of companionships and day-dreams and hopes, 
brought back again and pressed upon the heart in full 
and gushing stream, and yet could turn from it all 
without entertaining for each other one kindlier emo- 
tion than before, or pouring out one warmer benedic- 
tion upon the sanctuary that had sheltered and had 
reared them. The spirit, like the body, so depends 
upon the things of the present — so requires the daily 
ministration of its daily bread — that if its connexion 
with the past by frequent aids from the senses be taken 
away, its affections are taken also, and are yielded up, 
with little reservation, to the engrossments of the pass- 
ing hour. The past must be involved in all the 
movements and purposes, or it is practically lost — it 
drops away into distance and into shadow, and though 
the poetry of its hoary image may remain, the effective 
power of it is gone. It is the constant presence and 
reciprocity of benefits and dependance which consti- 
tute the general law of man's gratitude and attach- 
ment. Take an alumnus from under this law — the 
present and immediate sense of obligation and benefit 
— turn him from a student into a man of the world, 
engage him in its schemes, lay him open for years 
together to the multiplying import unities of business 
and care, and he will afterwards feel, when his sensibi- 
lities are recalled to this nursery of his mind, by some 
such occasion as the present, that its many claims had 



waned upon his memory — that his heart had drifted 
away from it far out to sea, but still, that its hold upon 
his affections, though shaken and weakened, had never 
been destroyed. This hold it is a wise and benevolent 
purpose of your association to strengthen and to con- 
tinue . To this end you lay your hand upon that of 
time, and check him in his waste before check is una- 
vailing : you contest with him his right to the unlimit- 
ed rule and ravage of the past, and you wring one of 
the dearest and most cherished portions of it from his 
grasp, by blending it here in annual and inspiring ex- 
hibition with the purposes of the present. You bring 
to this spot the graduate of another day, gather his 
friends and companions into his arms, surround him 
with associations and with scenes which embody the 
pictured story of his youth, with all its laugh and all 
its tears, and thus you revive the pulse which the 
tramp of the world had deadened, and thus you take 
from the heart the long grass which long years had 
gathered upon it. You do more than this — more than 
revive upon the graduate the sense of collegiate obli- 
gation; you collect the numerous and the scattered 
progeny of this institution of every age at a common 
rendezvous, and circulate amongst them the warm 
blood of family relationship. The elder son r who has 
spent his day as a missionary of letters, and is retiring 
from the field of his labours to the repose of age, is met 
and grouped upon this spot with a younger brother 
who is just girding for the contest, just going forth as 
a reaper of the harvest of life, and whilst they stand 
together at the side of the benefactor of both, enter- 
taining the same sentiment of allegiance and of grati- 



tude, every thing that makes them strangers to each 
other vanishes away, and the claims of a felt and 
kindred connexion immediately spring up between 
them. 

By this means you establish an exterior and unre- 
laxinsf interest in favour of tins college, which habitu- 
ally operates, to sustain its prosperity, upon the wide 
and willing contributions of the country. "When this 
convocation of its friends, warmed and animated by 
the impressions and incidents of this day. shall have 
been dissolved, and its members have gone back to the 
places from whence they had come, their homes will 
be so many separate rostra from which the claims and 
cause of the college will be pleaded with invigorated 
zeal, and pushed onward with fresher energy into broad- 
er and closer contact with the sympathies of the 
public. Fast and far as its value shall be proclaimed 
and felt and believed by the public, its foundations 
will be strengthened and its boundaries enlarged. 
Dedicated as it is to the great interests of mental pre- 
paration and power — to that cause which liberates the 
mind and equips its energies for all that is best in 
speculation and best in action — and long and amply 
as the pledge and purpose of this dedication has been 
redeemed before the face of the world, it may now 
command, is now entitled to command, from a bene- 
fited and confiding people, a help which shall be wide 
and sure and permanent as its own memorials of 
worth. Grant it a support in the degree of its desert 
— mete to it in the abundance of that measure where- 
with it has meted unto others — and no destiny could 
be nobler. Sharing with others in the struggles and 



- 

achieveiner./ ence. this institution maintains no 

arrogant pretence to exclusive renown or exclusive 
support. But where, it may be respectfully asked 
of all the confederates who have joined her in the ca- 
reer of It r —here is there one — yea, one — that has 
laboured with a truer or a better arm through the toil 
of the field, or poured out a flood of richer irrigation 
upon the intellect of the land ? Poor in every thing 
but her merit ; powerless in every thing but her fa- 
culties for service, these simple elements have been 
to her the fabled alchymy of philosophers by which she 
has turned every thing into gold : she has wrought out 
of them both endowment and wealth — transmuting 
her very poverty into a power which is enriching her- 
self with new abilities and her country with new 
benefactions. Newer forfeiting by delinquencies the 
pupil which her fame has attracted, she is yearly 
adding to the thousands who rise up at the mention of 
her name, through every portion of the land, to render 
her their homage, and to " call her blessed." Look 
back upon the lapse of a hundred years, see the 
kindred institutions which have faltered or failed 
at every step of that lengthened line, then turn your 
eye upon your own, and you see her always at her 
moorings : always on her arms ; alwavs fighting with 
the first and foremost in the holy cause for which 
she has enlisted ; never yielding her objects to a 
blanched and timid spirit, but pressing them on- 
ward with a bold one: gathering her trophies from 
her trials, her courage from her exertions; standing 
forth, at every point of that time, a cheering ex- 
ample to the weak and to the strong of her associ- 



10 

ates ; the white plume, indeed, of the great Henry 
of France, which soared in the battle when others fell? 
and led when others failed, and never led but to duty? 
to triumph, and to honour. 

Gratified especially as an alumnus will ever feel at 
deriving his academic obligations from an institution 
so beneficently distinguished as this, the patriot every 
where exults with him over the results it has already 
accomplished, and over the prognostics which shadow 
forth an honourable and useful future. To whatever 
limit the success of the college can be extended, it is in 
every possible expansion, the proper subject of every 
man's rejoicing. Its success is that of education ; the 
success of that cause through which reason, religion, 
liberty and law are to be maintained: the cause of 
rational, thinking, immortal man, over gross, perishable 
and animal man ; the cause of social and governed 
man, with his civilization advanced to the uttermost 
under the dominion of intelligence, or impaired to the 
uttermost under the abusive rule of rude and ignorant 
power. Adversary in relative effect, as institutions of 
learning may sometimes be upon the progress of each 
other, yet being auxiliaries for a common and a noble 
end, the spirit which would surround them with jeal- 
ousy, and thereby narrow as to any, or all of them, 
the measure of their popularity and effect, is a Vandal 
spirit which counterworks, as far as it goes, the great 
agent of human improvement, and restores the reign 
of barbarism and of night. It matters nothing to the 
world by what tongue the principles of duty be pro- 
claimed, nor by what hand the seeds of knowledge be 
sown. Wherever a prejudice has been conquered, 



11 

there an obstacle has been removed from the path of 
improvement ; wherever a truth has been maintained, 
there a post has been taken and fortified in the pro- 
gress of the mind. All that education with all of its 
agencies combined has ever yet been able to accom- 
plish, has been to retrieve from waste a portion only of 
our intellectual domain; to cover over with verdure 
and with fruit but a spot here and there of the univer- 
sal mind; whilst ignorance, like a great Zahara, 
stretches around even these with a fearful readiness, if 
not a power, to desolate them all by its desert and its 
drifting sands. And sustained and encouraged as edu- 
cation may be with every aid and appliance that may 
be had, it can never attain to perfect triumph over that 
" lust of the flesh and lust of the eye and pride of 
life" — that anti-trinity of the world which it has every 
where to meet and encounter as its enemy. But 
partial as its triumphs may be, it is still our great 
agent for breaking up the total usurpation of the appe- 
tites; for infusing a broader and deeper action of 
intelligence and virtue into the various enterprise of 
life ; for freshening up, more and more in the etherial 
and immortal spirit, that burning light, that impress of 
divinity within it, which animalism and earth have 
ever been in constant and in horrid league to darken 
and destroy. 

Independent and self-sustained as is the reputation 
of this college, and safely as it reposes upon the annals 
of the past and upon the very general and very signal 
success of its sons, still it is grateful, as an obscure one 
of these, to come to its side with a public testimony to 
its merit ; grateful to say, that whilst no dishonouring 



12 

restraint was ever laid upon the actions of its pupils, 
and no deceptive expedient ever practised to rob them 
of their time for the convenience of their teachers, 
that every thing, whether of discipline or instruction, 
was so ordered and enforced as to imbue them, as far 
as external agencies could imbue them, with sound 
knowledge, sound habits, and sound principles of 
public and private duty. Especially gratifying is it 
to say, that however frequently in professed discourses 
for that purpose, the great truths of religion, with their 
solemn sanctions, and their legitimate claim to the re- 
gulation of life, were set forth and maintained ; that 
however earnestly the union of piety and learning 
was inculcated as constituting the noblest result 
of human instruction, and as bringing into combi- 
nation the purest elements of rectitude and power, 
yet that no system of particular theology was ever 
commended to their adoption, no sectarism ever at- 
tempted to be fastened on their conscience. The 
irreversible claims of heaven were avowed— often and 
boldly avowed — but the mode of acknowledgment 
and submission was left to the heart and the judgment 
of the hearer. The spirit of party and proselytism was 
never here, but the provident and parental spirit which 
contemplated the thinking and undying portion of our 
nature, as having an interest in another condition of 
being, not to be forgotten or neglected in the prepa- 
rations of this, was never absent : it pleaded for no creed, 
it enlisted for no school, it laboured for no sect, but 
it taught, it warned, it entreated, it pointed to the des- 
tinies of the coming day, and, invoking the Father 
of all for the good of all, it trusted its bread to the wa- 



13 

ters, and cast out its plank for the rescue of the guilty 
and the drowning. 

Were your anniversary to accomplish no more than 
the re-union of old friendships and the extension of new, 
it would accomplish in this way something to render 
the life happier and better. You cannot associate men 
as you do the alumni, with all the memories of the 
past brought down in gathered and affecting impression 
upon them, without carrying through all their moral 
emotions a decisive and elevating influence. You 
place them where the selfish principle, for a season, 
gives way ; where they are drawn aside, insensibly, 
from the too separate and too entire concentration of 
the mind upon their peculiar interests and enjoyments ; 
where a genial and a healthy atmosphere from with- 
out is breathed through the narrowest and sickliest 
cells of the heart. Surrounded whilst here with all 
that can awaken their sensibilities, or deepen upon 
them the truths of social duty and dependance, they 
go back with their patriotism and their benevolence 
refreshed, and retire for the future into a wider circle 
of companionship and kindness, and a narrower one 
of prejudice, selfishness and aversion. Their country 
becomes dearer to them than before, because identified 
with an augmenting amount of personal attachments 
and an augmenting interest in her great systems of 
public amelioration, and they, in turn, become dearer 
to their country, because of that very multiplication 
of motives which confederate them more indissolubly 
than ever with her efforts, and pledge them with 
increased responsibilities to her cause. 

But there is another effect attaching to this anniver- 



14 

sary which is distinct, important, and not partaken of 
by any other public assemblage. No where but here 
can the man, who has gone out upon the career of life 
from the instructions of this place, ever have his heart 
so sternly or so inexorably challenged to stand forth 
and to render up its honest account of that purest of 
all trusts — the trust of educated talent — which the 
college has bestowed upon him. Let the challenge 
be met with such brow and such courage as it may, 
its naked justice will tell upon the conscience, and its 
imperious demands will extort from that equitable 
judge a hearing and an answer. The noble trust, 
itself a faculty, with all of its conventional distinc- 
tion, all of its vast and unlimited power of command 
over the transactions and treasures of mind, and 
through these, over all the objects and systems of hu- 
man enterprise and interest, has been committed to 
his hands ; how profitably or how vainly, with what 
miserable or what ample avail for its magnificent uses, 
it is now for him, if never before, to feel and to ac- 
knowledge. Never does the responsibility of this con- 
fided faculty come over conscience with such ascen- 
dant and overawing control, as when he brings it back, 
after the interval and employment of years, and stands 
with it in the presence, the public presence, of the 
benefactor who gave it. Never does the call to self- 
examination and to trial for the full and faithful appli- 
cation of it, sweep over him with such a felt and sub- 
duing authority as then, nor ever does the heart, 
thrown loose at once from all its subterfuge and stra- 
tagem and pride, rise up so involuntarily or so honest- 
ly to respond and to confess. It may not shrink, it 



15 

may not shudder, it may not weep over the poor and 
the scanty memorials on which its suffrage upon itself 
is to rest ; but he whose heart can exult, can triumph 
in its testimonies, can claim the perfect peace which 
perfect fidelity only can inspire, may hail himself as 
privileged and as blessed beyond the scope and the 
allotment of his fellows. 

It is but yesterday — so vivid is the remembrance 
of that vivid hour that intervening years melt into 
moments — that all this gay and gladdening pageantry 
was for us; but yesterday that we stood upon this 
very spot as buoyant and as sanguine as the younger 
brotherhood around us, as eager and as armed as they 
for the encounter of life ; cheered and guided onward, 
like themselves, to all its purposes and perils by bene- 
dictions and by counsels ; and whilst the honoured 
guerdon of our youthful ambition — the spur and the 
belt of college knighthood— was publicly conferred, 
we too were adjured to receive it as pledging us before 
man and heaven to an unflinching career of fidelity 
and of service to both. Our going forth upon the 
labours of life was such as we have to day : the greet- 
ing multitude, the fervid hope, the flattering augury, 
the promise and prediction of cultivated talent was 
all ours, and ours too the parent's and the patriot's 
prayer that for every faculty conferred upon us here, 
measure for measure should elsewhere be rendered to 
God and to our country. Such was our departure : 
what our return? Have we returned faithful in the 
administration of the fiduciary fund which was com- 
mitted to our charge, or faithless and recreant, distin- 
guished most, or distinguished only by the vestiges of 



16 

the summers' suns that have burned upon us ? Do we 
return rewarded and graced with memorials of achieve- 
ment ; with our pathway strewn over by the traces of 
the good we have done ; with our hearts rejoiced, like 
those of wise and watchful husbandmen, at the rich and 
ripening fruits of our approaching autumn ? Or come 
we hither with nothing but the sear and yellow leaf 
that tells of barrenness and decline ? Only look at our 
thinned and mutilated number, and see how fearfully 
" the breaker has gone up amongst them ;" how many 
there are of those, who partook as deeply as ourselves 
of the animation of that day, who have been taken 
from the tribunals and the trials of earth, and have 
passed to accountabilities where faith only can follow 
them ! But whilst we lament as to these that the 
whole of life is extinguished, have we no reason to 
mourn over a part of our own as no. less irrecoverably 
gone? Have we buried no years nor months of 
healthful and vigorous manhood, and that with a be- 
reavement the bitterer and the more afflicting as no 
circumstance may survive to soften and hallow them 
to our memory ? Some of you may have rightfully 
put forth your faculties in the very spirit for which 
they were given, and have benefited and bettered man 
by that holy property of knowledge which associates 
the public good in a constant union with every just 
and strenuous exercise of its cultivated power. Some 
of you there are who will, doubtless, be remembered, 
and be had in reverence by the world, who, in your 
various vocations, have plucked a pain from the body, 
a sorrow from the spirit; have guided the wayward 
with counsel, the wandering with light, or have stepped 



17 

forth in some seasonable or exigent hour of your 
country's fortunes to brace and to build up, with a 
scholar's and a patriot's power, her edifice of freedom. 
But are there no others whose stewardship of educa- 
tion is a record only of upbraiding and sorrow and 
shame ? No others who have shrunk with unmanly 
weakness from the fulfilment of its trusts, or with 
guilty and traitorous spirit have profaned them to pur- 
poses of evil ? Are there none who have carried this 
noble power of instructed mind into a haughty and 
enervating and useless retirement, or who have thrown 
it away as a vain and glittering bauble, although it is 
that to which the guardianship of man is committed, 
that which elevates him above the clod of the valley, 
and approaches him almost to an angel's station ? Are 
there none of you over whom friendship and justice 
have often cried out in lamentation as in reproach, 
"why liest thou upon thy face ; get thee, oh, get thee 
up?" If, haply, there be none who mingles in this 
array as the blasted mingles with the wholesome ear ; 
none who returns to this spot with even his solitary 
talent wrapped and folded up in the napkin in which 
he received it ; none who comes with all his powers 
lopped away, shorn and sorrowing from the hands of 
some fatal Delilah; no judge upon this side the grave 
will so rejoice as that judge in the heart who sits and 
tries for all of us to-day the issues of the past. If 
there be, let him go hence and return again resolved 
to answer in repentance and in pain no more. Yea, 
let us all profit of the consciousness and the teachings 
of this hour ; let us go back to the field of our unfinish- 
ed labours with a bolder and better spirit, there to re- 
3 



18 

deem to the uttermost our obligations to man and to 
heaven, and so to blend the trials of this life with the 
eternal issues of the next, that when our mortal agony 
shall come, it may find us in peace, our dying hour be 
disburthened of remorse, and our spirits, as we bow to 
the tomb, greeted with angel voice, calling to us from 
within and from above, " child of God, ascend to heaven." 
Let it not be supposed by our younger friends, the 
under graduates of this institution, that our sympa- 
thies are so exhausted upon ourselves that we have no 
portion of them to spare for them and their condition. 
This can never be, as no situation can ever arouse a 
more commanding or a tenderer interest than yours. 
It is a situation most honoured for the honoured cause 
it involves, the public hopes it embodies; dear to 
every one who knows its trials and who sympathises 
with the manly and the self-denying virtues it de- 
mands. Believe me, that a wide and watchful inter- 
est, comprehending every father and mother of the 
land, would be directed to your situation here, were it 
viewed apart from all intellectual results, and regarded 
only as exhibiting upon a prominent theatre that most 
perilous of all moral contests, where a body of youth, 
thrown loose from a parent's observation and a parent's 
counsel, are left in the hot and riot season of the blood, 
with no other arms than their virtue, to contend and 
to grapple with temptation, fighting with his hundred 
hands, in one of the chosen seats (forbidden though it 
be) of his revel and his power. But there is another 
interest entertained in your behalf which is distinct 
from this, though no other can ever be higher or more 
generally felt. You are regarded as a part of that 



19 

favoured and distinguished few who are to constitute 
hereafter the life-guard of letters ; to whom the lofty 
destiny is appointed of going the foremost in the 
march, directing and enlightening all others in the 
pathway and purposes of knowledge, as the convoy 
ship which gives pilotage and protection to the feebler 
vessels that follow in its wake. In this relation it is 
that the eye, the hope, the heart of the community, are 
upon you, and upon you with such intensity of obser- 
vation and of wish as might well arouse, were it ne- 
cessary, your own sense of duty and achievement. 
Your acquisitions, and your rejoicings on account of 
them, are in truth the acquisitions and rejoicings of 
the public, that public too which will feel for your fail- 
ures, should any unhappily arise, some portion of that 
humiliation and disappointment, whose heavier and 
bitterer part will be reserved to wound and crush the 
feelings of those, the most revered and loved of your- 
selves, who, of all others upon earth, have the holiest 
claims upon you to be saved and sheltered from such 
sorrow. Distinguished, therefore, by elevated and 
peculiar responsibilities as is your situation here, you 
will bear, I trust, with a suggestion or two, however 
obvious they may be, as to the means of securing its- 
advantages the most permanently and surely. 

As one of these means, let it be urged upon you never 
to regard your college education as a mere embellish- 
ment of the mind, but always as an active and repro- 
ducing power of it ; never as a merely graceful 
accompaniment, qualifying you to enter with ease and 
zest into the elegant gratifications of genius and taste, 
but as a new or supplemental faculty, so wrought into 



20 

the texture and substance of all the other faculties, as 
to strengthen and harden them all for increased use- 
fulness and increased exertion. There is so frequent 
a tendency to the merely ornamental in college edu- 
cation, and a tendency which is oftentimes so disguised 
as to be neither suspected nor felt, that the most habi- 
tual vigilance is scarcely sufficient to detect or arrest 
it. Whenever the mind is unwilling to enter into 
communion or into action with its own thoughts; 
whenever it becomes impossible without pain and 
constraint upon it to abstract it from its prescribed 
subjects of exercise and study, and engage it, however 
briefly, in the laborious exercise of its own powers ; 
whenever it relapses from this exercise wearied or dis- 
gusted with the task, and recurs to it with increasing 
and still increasing reluctance ; whenever this is the 
case, be assured either that your education (which is, 
substantially, the faculty of the mind to control itself) 
has not been begun, or that the symptoms of a diseased 
one are upon you; that the process of unsuspected 
enervation is going on, and that you are in danger of 
permitting the chosen means for invigorating the mind 
to be so perverted as to fasten indolence, weakness and 
dependance upon your own. Mistake not for educa- 
tion that excitement or animation of mind which the 
exercise of your literary taste may produce. No such 
light and transitory impulse to mental pleasure or 
reflection can any more supply the place of those 
severe and painful exercises of analysis and induction, 
by which only the mind is trained to a full develope- 
ment and control of its powers, than the spasmodic 
excitement of exhilarating gas can supply the healthi- 



21 

er and homelier fare that nourishes the springs of ani- 
mal life. The higher, indeed, the strength and the 
capacity for labour and action into which the mind can 
be educated, the better does the state of it consist with, 
the graces and gratifications of the lighter tastes, just 
as the strongest columns give surest support to the 
parasite plants that hang and wreath themselves in 
ornament upon them. But admirable as may be 
those lighter tastes when found in fellowship with the 
stronger powers, as the twin products of the same cul- 
tivation, they are comparatively valueless, if not worse, 
when found by themselves : they may still in some 
sort embellish, but it is as the hectic flush which 
brightens on the cheek of disease, and which only 
beautifies, for a moment, the fatal ruin it reveals. 
Betray not yourselves into the folly of pursuing the 
embellishments of education separate from its utilities, 
nor fill your minds with the vain and misguiding phan- 
tasy of a lettered and dignified repose ; but fill them 
with manly purposes of energy and exertion r and la- 
bour to bring them, by every means within your reach, 
into the solid and hardy texture which shall fit them 
for exposure to all weathers, and for the wear and tear, 
the rugged work of all employments. Look to your 
education, at all times, in its double aspect of a po7ver, 
and a trust, a power providentially placed in your 
hands, but in trust for the good of others as for your- 
selves, that thus you may have an early and habitual 
and adequate appreciation of its obligations and its 
worth. Only settle it, in your own judgment, upon 
this just and comprehensive basis, and its responsibili- 
ties will be enforced upon you by the calls of a double 



22 

duty; its delinquencies forbidden as involving the 
crime and curse of a double treason, a treason to 
yourselves and to society. Cast from you, then, the 
besotted yet besetting folly of making it only the 
dreamy companion of the closet, the elegant and hon- 
oured guest of the drawing-room, and seize upon it as 
the great instrument which is appointed of heaven to 
the hardest and the noblest service, the improvement 
and subjugation of the world ; the only one which ele- 
vates where it conquers ; which achieves its victories 
without blood, and gathers in its trophies from land to 
land amid the shout of human blessings, and with- 
out the stain of a human tear. 

Let it be urged upon you, as a cardinal maxim in 
mental education, always to study and to labour for re- 
sults ; never to be satisfied upon any subject submitted 
to your examination, until you shall have followed 
it up and thought it out to its simplest elements. 
Only establish this analytical habit of reducing all 
subjects to their constituent parts, and of thus estima- 
ting them in their simple as well as compounded 
form, and you will be speedily rewarded with rapid 
perception, with sound judgment, with ripe and vigo- 
rous powers of investigation and of reasoning. No 
other habit makes the mind so rich, so ready, so prac- 
tical, nor does any other conduct its operations with 
such entire fidelity, or challenge for its decisions so 
safe and habitual a confidence. Science itself, as you 
well know, is but a collection of final truths, a body 
of established results : the more nearly then we bring 
our current subjects of investigation and interest, 
where the nature of them will admit, to like results 



23 

by like methods, the better will we understand them, 
and the more closely shall we approximate the whole 
volume of our knowledge to the certainties and the 
value of demonstrated truth. But let this habit of 
mind be neglected and left unestablished, and inde- 
cision, inaccuracy and confusion of thought inevitably 
follow : the ideas become little better than the spectral 
groupings of the camera obscura, shadowy, dim, fan- 
tastic, disproportioned, and the whole mind for every 
purpose of prompt and judicious action, above all, for 
every purpose of energetic practical action, is made 
weaker and poorer by its unavailable accumulations of 
power and wealth. It is needless to say that this 
habit comes only of much and wearisome labour, and 
that to expect it, or expect any thing else that is val- 
uable in life to be otherwise derived, is the folly of the 
-dotard and the child, the mirage of the credulous and 
dreaming sluggard, and as fatal in its illusion, though 
far more voluntary, than that of the desert, which 
mocks the fainting traveller to disappointment and to 
death by the sight and sound of ideal waters. If in 
relation to this or to other objects of attainment which 
make up your purposes and duties here, you pause 
and doubt and stretch forth a feeble and hesitating- 
hand, and approach your labours with sinking heart 
or averted eye, be assured that you palter with your- 
selves, that you covenant with impotence and shame 
and disappointment, that you plunder your country of 
its rightful expectations, and throw from your own pos- 
session a far more legitimate power over the trea- 
sures of this world as well as of the next, than ever 
was symbolled to catholic faith by the key or the 



24 

crown of St. Peter. Labour is the inexorable and un- 
changing law under which every faculty must be 
brought if you would rise above the ignominy of help- 
less and dishonoured life ; but inexorable as it is, if it 
rules you with a tyrant's power, it blesses you with a 
parent's benefactions. It has been decreed against 
man, as his eternal doom, that he should live only by 
the "sweat of his brow;" against the serpent, that it 
should crawl " and eat of the dust of the earth all of 
the days of its life." Choose ye, therefore, between 
the alternatives ordained by providence itself: work, 
as it is the doom of man to do, and take with it all the 
prerogatives and glories of man; work not, as is the 
doom of the serpent, and take, with this imagined 
indulgence, the crawling, trampled and loathed condi- 
tion of your reptile enemy. 

Suggestions connected with your avocations and 
duties so crowd upon the mind, that whilst it would 
be improper to enlarge, it is difficult to retrench. You 
have all read the story of the royal Attila breaking 
with his hungry and brutal horde over the defences 
of imperial Rome, trampling her refinements and in- 
stitutions in the dust, and extinguishing the last and 
the pale light which still shone from the capitol for 
the guidance and the renovation of man. You have 
read it, and have burned with impatient and indignant 
anger at the rapacious and the conquering savage, but 
did you feel how inexpressibly baser than he, was the 
degraded and the sunken Roman, who quailed and 
shrunk and stooped to the blow which ravaged and 
ruined his country ? It was a noble trophy to the pride 
of the brave but ruthless Goth to smite so illustrious 



25 

an enemy to the earth, and to brandish his gleaming 
sword in shouts of triumph over the " eternal city," as 
the hero and the master of its fate. The darker and 
deeper infamy of the tragedy must ever rest upon the 
degenerate Roman, who lifted up as he was above all 
others by freedom and letters, yet recked not of their 
inspiration, but crouched, cowered and sunk in his own 
consecrated temples of liberty and war, and wore the 
brand and bandage of a slave amongst the monuments 
and in the presence of his glory. Take the Attila of 
the story as the striking and pictured representative of 
that ignorant and savage spirit which wars against the 
attainments and the institutions of learning; the im- 
potent and degraded Roman, as the recreant son of 
education, who meets the fury and the waste of his 
ruffian antagonist by a craven, heartless and futile 
resistance. Whenever, then, you look upon the re- 
gion of letters and of thought, and mourn over the 
invasions of ignorance within it, turn your wrath upon 
the traitor sentinel who abandons the posts and prepa- 
rations of defence. Be faithful, therefore, to your 
trust, and never share in the reproach of having 
betrayed the city or the temple whose lights you have 
enjoyed, and for whose protection and defence you are 
set. So act as man and scholar, that you may come up 
from these halls of learning and these years of temp- 
tation, without a want to your usefulness or a wound 
upon your name, with powers which need nothing 
but a theatre for service, and a character which, like 
the rock at Megara, whereupon the lyre of Apollo 
was laid, shall send forth its notes of sweetness and 
melody from whatever side it be touched. 



26 

To you who have just received the ceremonial seal, 
which closes your connexion with the college, and 
which accredits you with honourable testimony to the 
world, this hour, glad as it is in the exulting sense of 
independence which it inspires, is the beginning one 
of more anxious and solemn consequence than any 
other that has opened upon you. It is an hour which 
advances you to undertakings and duties which, 
whether considered in reference to mind or character, 
outmeasure by far, in complication and importance, 
any other to which you have yet been called. The 
gown, with all the responsibilities and obligations of 
manhood, is taken to day. The rubicon of youth is 
passed, and is now behind you : the battle of life stands 
ready before. The quiet harbour, where you have 
been ministered to for years in gentleness and peace, is 
now quit, and you are launched upon the wave of the 
wide sea, where your pilotage and success must be 
such as heaven and your own good heart shall supply. 
At this moment, which is always one of rejoicing, 
follow what may, when the restraints of impatient 
pupilage are taken away, and the heart leaps forward 
to busy life as to a revel and a feast; at this moment 
to read you over the lessons of a grey and care-worn 
experience is, in some sort you may think, to exhibit 
anew the mystic hands and the mystic words upon 
the wall, the skeleton finger and the boding motto, 
calling up only images of gloom unseasonably to dim 
the ruby of your cup, unkindly to check the joy of 
your banquet. Rather imagine that as you are no 
Belshazzars to tremble at prophetic revealings, and I 
no sage or seer to announce them, that some words 



27 

not of gloom, but of soberness and truth, may even 
now be spoken which may benefit and aid you when 
this festal hour shall have gone. So presuming, let it 
be said, that if you would acquire firmness, elevation 
and weight of character at the very outset in life, if 
you would impart to the mind the whole of that con- 
sistency and vigour of which it is susceptible, and 
would crown all these virtues by reputation and by pro- 
fit, then choose at once the profession or pursuit to 
which you intend to be attached, and embody all your 
energies in preparation for it. Choose candidly, upon 
thorough examination of yourself, but choose promptly. 
Decline to do so, loiter away a year or two of the most 
precious period of your lives in the vain and voluntary 
self-delusion that you are wisely exercising your judg- 
ment with observation and reading and facts, that you 
may decide at last with the better discretion ; do this, 
as thousands have done to their sorrow, and not only 
will the tone and courage of your mind abate, and all of 
its faculties gradually give way under the abandonment 
of its accustomed discipline, but innumerable conjec- 
tures of hypothetical evil will fill it, and visionary rea- 
sons for further and further delay will spring up in 
afflicting abundance on every side of you, to postpone 
and perplex your decision. Every moment not impe- 
ratively demanded by the necessities of self-examina- 
tion and an intelligent survey of the general operations 
of society, every one beyond this, which is spent under 
the deceptive pretence of deliberation and inquiry, 
only aggravates your perplexity and distress, and will 
ultimately fasten upon your mind the distempered and 
incurable habit of halting and indecision. You may 



28 

search and search and be no more profited withal than 
the inquiring and eccentric hermit who roamed 
through the world, looking in all its paths with a 
candle in his hand for an honest man, but retired at 
last, wearied, disappointed and disheartened to his 
cell, where, as the fable reads, he renounced his hopes, 
extinguished his torch, and died in despair. Let all 
waywardness and caprice be dismissed from your 
choice, and your plan of life be definitely settled, and 
it is amazing to see how instantaneous is that firmness 
and energy which result to the mind from this single 
act of concentrating its purposes and powers. But 
delay and delay, and as no system of life is adopted, or 
adopted in time, your self-control, your sense of per- 
sonal value, your efficiency and your promptitude of 
decision are all lost : your struggles to live, to act, to 
play your part in society as might become you, insen- 
sibly but inevitably dwindle down into a petty and 
contemptible shuffle of daily expedients; and repen- 
tance, mortification, disappointment, to say nothing of 
positive and resulting vices, oftentimes follow after to 
bring up in mournful array the procession of life. 

The idea of a gentlemanly acquaintance, as it is 
called, with all subjects of liberal knowledge, without 
committal to the supposed drudgery of pursuing any 
one of them professionally or laboriously, is native to 
the region of a college, and is in truth, one of those 
dangerous hallucinations which oftentimes haunt, with 
more than the power or the mischief of sorcery, the 
minds of sprightly and speculative young men. The 
reign of it, however, would be short and comparatively 
harmless, were it not occasionally favoured by those ex~ 



29 

ternal circumstances of wealth which the youthful pos- 
sessor so often and so ruinously interprets into a full dis- 
charge from all the labours of life, and into a title-deed 
to all of its blessings and enjoyments. Let all such 
especially beware of the fascinations and tendencies 
of this delusive idea : let them spurn it away as a 
counsellor and emissary of evil, as a false and profligate 
adviser, who would persuade them, with demon logic, 
to convert their means and faculties for service into 
motives and instruments for uselessness and sloth. 
Never permit property, though it should pour in upon 
you in constant and unebbing stream, to decoy you by 
its soft persuasives from the hardy and practical uses 
of education ; but make it the rather give weight and 
power to that education, just as the grosser metal 
which forms the body of the woodsman's axe, is made 
by him to give weight and power to the finer steel 
which is fitted on the edge. If inherited wealth 
takes you from the labours of the field, and education 
does not equip you for those of the mind, you are lost, 
in both, to the productive uses of society, and you abuse, 
through both, the highest faculties for service which 
its institutions can secure. Be your circumstances 
what they may, forget not that that life is most accept- 
able to God, which being first most submissive to 
Him, is after that, most useful to man. 

Out of the representative structure of our govern- 
ment, and, out of that perfect dependance upon the ca- 
pabilities of the general mind which it requires, there 
arises to every American citizen — above all — to every 
educated one, the imperative duty of combining, with 
his preparations for private life, some preparation at 



30 

least, for those public trusts to which, in some form, it 
is both his right and obligation to contribute. No view 
or estimate of duty to an educated citizen could be 
poorer or humbler or more wretchedly mistaken in the 
latitude or comprehensivness of its objects, than that 
which does not place what he owes to his country 
side by side with that which he owes to himself. 
And this view, which is the true one, acquires a yet 
loftier and more inspiring character, when that country 
itself is regarded as discharging a duty not limited to 
its own citizens, but experimental in its results upon 
the interests of the world; as in the very midst of a 
problem auspicious in its prosecution thus far to 
the hopes of deceived, oppressed, misgoverned man 
— a problem, whose great issue is destined to prove, 
whether that government which is the freest is not at 
the same time, the strongest and the best for all the 
purposes of regulated freedom; whether the largest 
possible amount of national happiness and power is not 
always built up on the largest amount of civil and in- 
dividual liberty. Whilst every freeman amongst us, 
being a unit of the government, is pledged to the issue 
of a problem so affecting, by its immeasurable results, 
the expectations and the destinies of millions, upon 
you nevertheless, and upon others of kindred condition, 
who have partaken the most deeply of the benefits of 
the government, and will, doubtless, share the most 
largely in its representative functions, devolves more 
justly and eminently than upon all beside, the burden 
and the responsibility of its success. From whom 
else could such aid so properly and so efficiently come ? 
The help required is that which statesmen can render 



31 

the best, and where, but to our public institutions of 
learning, as so many nurseries for that purpose, are 
our statesmen to be looked for ? those who are such in 
all the worth and glory of the title, whether their wis- 
dom sheds its light only in the daily offices and inter- 
course of men, or whether it be appropriated by their 
countrymen, and thus be made to brighten, to guide, 
and to bless in the senate. It is to these institutions 
we look, nor have we looked in vain. They have often 
given us their supplies, have given us men who are 
amongst the honoured and venerated of the world; 
who have aided to fix the landmarks of mind for the 
age, and have earned, by their genius and their services, 
an undying record in a nation's heart. You are to fol- 
low — you too are to come up to the help of your country, 
and when you do come, the hope and the prayer of all 
is, that it may be with the enlightened head and the 
bold heart, and the consecrating patriotism which, 
combining to place you amongst the foremost in capa- 
city, shall place you, also, amongst the foremost in 
usefulness and honour. Without hereditary office, or 
entailed inheritance, or any other of those artificial 
arrangements which throw a government upon distinct 
classes of society, either by positive appointment or 
by necessary effect, without any of these but indepen- 
dently of them all, our government stands where it 
pleases heaven that man himself should stand, upon 
the simple and natural footing of intelligence and 
virtue. Mind, cultivated and virtuous mind, is the 
only fountain of legitimacy to the government or of 
rank to the citizen. A Persian Caliph pointed to 
his scymetar and his soldiers as the true and proper 



32 

arbiters of disputed succession : this, said he, is my 
pedigree, and these its supporters and its proofs. 
America, with a more heaven-directed spirit, points 
to the morals and the mind of her sons — both regula- 
ted and both enlightened — as the only sure and equi- 
table ground work of public or private authority. 
And it is in you that these qualities are expected to 
be found, upon you, in part, that your country- 
depends for their possession and their exercise. Nour- 
ish your understandings, therefore, for the duties that 
are before you, and when you enter upon them, forget 
not that they are public duties, that as such they are 
never to be confounded with personal objects nor pro- 
faned to the unholy end of pampering a vain, selfish, 
or profligate ambition. Public offices are trusts, pure 
trusts; conferred in faith for the general weal, and 
opposed throughout the whole range of their intend- 
ments, to all the purposes of individual advantage. 
To pursue them, therefore, as being in any respect 
whatsoever the proper subjects of traffic or private 
emolument — to clutch at and seize upon and apply 
them as the just acquisition of personal booty, is in 
reality to perpetrate a robbery; a robbery more wicked 
and worse than that which classic fable has punished 
with the naked rock and the gnawing vulture ; nay, 
it is to commit simony against the state, only less 
criminal and less accursed in itself than that simony 
against heaven, which would have purchased its gifts 
and its powers to dishonour, defile and destroy them. 
In this connexion with the subject of public trusts 
it is not inopportune to add, that as all of them, however 
varied their relations, depend at last upon the applica- 



33 

lion, in sonre form or other, ©f the popular sovereignty 
of our government, so therefore, as a just inference 
from the proposition, you should never entertain a 
derisive or contemptuous opinion of the aggregate 
popular understanding. This understanding is at one 
and the same moment, the inceptive and the correc- 
tive power of the government, so that to impeach it 
habitually by a sneering and scoffing under-estimate of 
its value, is, in fact, habitually to weaken and waste 
the vital energy of the government itself, with that of 
all the interests and institutions it upholds. But a 
low estimate of that understanding is not only a 
malum prohibitum, as being contradictory of the positive 
principle of the government, it is a malum per se — not 
only a wrong, because subversive of the very founda- 
tions on which we stand, but a wrong in fact, a false 
opinion, the more mischievous because often inhering, 
like a flaw in the diamond, in the minds of educated 
men. It is, as you well know, upon the higher or 
lower estimate of the popular understanding, as upon 
a graduated scale, that we have had, in all ages, many 
of those varieties of liberty and restriction which dis- 
tinguish the different governments of the world — from 
the republic, where the whole body of civil freedom is 
entrusted to collective man as its only safe and natural 
depository, up through every modification of artificial 
restraint, to that perfect despotism which invests its 
custody in the robber sovereign, who has plundered 
and wrenched it from the people. In the midst of 
your own freedom, cheering and vivifying to us all as 
the sun in his brightness, beware lest you cherish 
opinions ruinous of the principles which secure it, and 



34 

congruous only with the fundamental and fatal doc- 
trines — the unrighteous and impious dogmas of those 
governments which restrain and destroy it. What- 
ever the inlet amongst educated men of an undervalu- 
ing opinion of the popular mind ; whether to be found 
in the habitual and exclusive study for years of no 
other than the highest models of the human intellect, 
and in the contempt thus insensibly and gradually 
developed for every marked degree of inferior capacity 
or cultivation ; whether to be found in this or some 
other source, it is an error — a gross and pernicious 
error, as a free intermixture with the great mass of our 
general population will abundantly demonstrate. Go 
to this mass, you will not see the refinements of edu- 
cation, the rich and deep alluvion which it has poured 
out upon the college mind, but you will see a clear- 
sighted and vigorous and over-mastering common 
sense, imperfectly aided indeed, but still awakened 
into general and powerful activity, not only sustaining 
at this moment the government and all its institutions, 
but sustaining and directing also a diversity, a com- 
plication, and a magnitude of private business, which 
is wholly unequalled amongst equal numbers of any 
other people upon earth. Go and strip the coarse and 
the homely covering from off the general mind of our 
countrymen, as the South American hunter, by acci- 
dent, stripped from the mountain side the shrub, which 
showed, under the concealment of its roots, whole 
quarries of gold, and though you may meet not, as he 
did, with the glittering ore which purchased for ages 
nothing but impotence and sorrow and bonds for the 
country of its native home, yet you will meet with an 



35 

iron intellect — an intellect of that ruggeder and better 
metal which, wherever it be found, whether in the 
heads or the hands of a people, alike protects them 
against poverty and against power. Let therefore 
every prejudiced conception of the popular capacity, 
should you entertain any, be cast from you at once 
and forever as doubly unjust, unjust to your country- 
men, unjust to yourselves — as resting upon a wrong in 
judgment — ending in a wrong in results, contributing 
to destroy all sympathy between you, and at last per- 
fecting its injustice and its injury by driving you, it 
may be, with whatever fitness you may have, from the 
public service of your country. The very beginning 
of such a prejudice too, should be received with the 
greater distrust, as it is one of the melancholy facts of 
history that learned men, as a body, have never been 
distinguished amongst the Hampdens, and the Hen- 
rys, and the Sydneys of mankind : yea, a melancho- 
ly truth, that comparatively common men, acting upon 
the inextinguishable principles and feelings of nature, 
have conquered and maintained the rights which the 
sage and the scholar, acting upon the abstractions of 
the closet, have discountenanced or denounced as per- 
nicious or forbidden. 

In the party struggles which are incident, of necess- 
ity, to the organization of our political system, the 
safety-valve of the system itself, and that which has 
hitherto been relied upon with success, is placed in the 
firmness, intelligence and unpurchaseable honesty of 
our general population. In every contest then to which 
your duty or your feelings may commit you, resolve, 
at all hazards, to remain honest both to yourselves and 



36 

to your country, and so imbue your minds with the 
inexpressible value of this one patriot quality, in sus- 
taining the great ends of your government, and strip- 
ping party of all that is pernicious in its power, that 
when you are put upon that most painful and most 
generous exercise of it to which you can be put — 
the sacrifice, namely, of your party ties for conscience 
and for country's sake — you may find it easy to your 
disciplined and determined virtue. Party of itself is 
no necessary evil, and let those who look upon it in 
this light, and who bewail the wrangles and the jealous- 
ies and the ignoble acts by which it is oftentimes dis- 
tinguished, let them remember that they but lament 
over other forms of common and inherited frailty. In 
its worst shape, it has never yet been more than " the 
rust of our system," which free action has always brush- 
ed away. And despite of all the phantasms and the dog- 
mas upon this subject, which closet philosophy or politi- 
cal scepticism may engender and proclaim to affright or 
to teach us, who will dare to say that the purest aris- 
tocracies and the noblest privileged classes which man 
has ever seen, were not more completely the slaves of 
selfish influences and passions, having nothing in com- 
mon with the public good, than the most degenerate 
and untutored populace they ever despised or oppress- 
ed ? It has pleased heaven, in its wisdom, to commit 
to every man his eternal interests, as being the safest 
and best depository of them, for himself: and if there 
is one lesson which reason and history, properly 
consulted, teach more emphatically than another, it is 
the one analogous to this, if indeed it be not a part of 
it, that man too is the best depository of his temporal 



37 

rights — that these are always safest when held and 
guarded by himself. In no age, however blind or cor- 
rupt it be, have we one solitary instance of a whole 
people wilfully undoing themselves. But how many 
and by how horrible expedients of punishment and 
perjury and wrong, have been wilfully and cruelly 
ruined and undone by their rulers ! 

The party excesses which now and then have distin- 
guished our political contests, have thus far broken 
and exploded upon our system, only as the meteoric 
lights which glare and terrify for a moment, and then 
break and explode upon the earth, without jostling 
or impeding in the least its onward and its massive 
movement. 

There are one or two views of duty arising from 
the influence and effect, both domestic and exterior, 
of the federative principle of our system, which y 
though familiar perhaps to you all, are yet important 
and may well be urged upon your earnest regards. 
Look at this system in all of its extent, and you 
will see that every analysis to which it can be sub- 
jected will prove that no other one is more difficult 
to be abused to violent ends, or, when abused, more 
easily restored to sound and to wholesome action — 
incapable therefore of tyranny, and when entrusted 
to its own provisions, easily capable of self-adjust- 
ment. Nay, farther, a full analysis will show that no 
other system can do so much as it can, if administered 
upon its established principles, to advance the purposes of 
knowledge and civilization, because no other combines 
such a multitude of separate centres, each one of which, 
within itself, gives increased activity to every thing? 



38 

thereby adding to the power of all human movements, 
and each one affording, in times of trial or distress, a 
refuse and a shelter from the errors and misfortunes 
of all the rest. Brit these general results are deduced, 
not exclusively indeed, but mainly from the postulate 
that the federal bond is secure. Here in this bond — in 
the concentration or the hostility of power it involves — 
we have both the strength and the weakness of our sys- 
tem. This is, therefore, precisely the controlling and 
the vital point, which the patriotism and the wisdom of 
all are most required to cherish and defend. If we judge 
from the general principles of national intercourse 
and action, or from the ordinary, well understood, and 
unchangeable passions of the human heart, no other 
within the whole range of political events is more proba- 
ble, if not more demonstrable, than this, that whensoever 
the federal union be dissolved, be it by consent or by 
violence, and the several states which compose it be 
re-arranged into smaller confederacies, or formed into 
separate and integral commonwealths, the present 
peaceful and happy relations amongst them will be 
progressively, perhaps immediately, changed into re- 
lations of jealousy, enmity, altercation, and war. 
Look at their immense inequalities of geographical 
advantage and of physical power ; at the dangerous 
and tempting vicinity of the weak to the strong : at 
their long lines of border connexion, with the innu- 
merable provocatives and facilities to every species of 
trespass, and of jurisdictional evasion and complaint, 
which these must always afford : look at the lakes and 
the bays and the rivers intervening amongst them, the 
noble bonds of peace because of interest and prosperi- 



39 

ty now, but then the never-failing sources of quarrel, 
because of contested rights and privileges of naviga- 
tion — above all, look at the radical and disaffecting 
differences which inhere in their respective habits 
and texture of society, and you have in all these a 
mass of elements which, however providentially and 
beneficently harmonized under our federal head, could 
generate nothing else, amongst separate states, than 
jealousy, repugnance, irritation and bloodshed. When- 
ever border aggression, or any other of the thousand 
causes of war which national folly or wrong is ever 
at hand to supply, shall bring up actual hostilities be- 
tween these separated states, then the evil hour of 
them all has come, and their after fortunes will be little 
else than variations of struggle, of agony and woe. 
Let war be threatened or felt, and all of its muni- 
ments, its levies of money and men, its garrisons and ar- 
mies and navies will have to be provided, and provi- 
ded the more lavishly in our case, from the proximity 
of the parties and their vast accessibilities to mutual 
and to vital attack. This demand for military means, 
thus heightened by the extraordinary exposure of the 
parties, must conduct sooner or later, as under less 
evident necessity it has conducted every where else, to 
that readiest and fatallest of all expedients to supply it — 
the expedient of a standing army — which itself can 
never be resorted to in our case, without requiring the 
organization of a new and more powerful, if not abso- 
lute executive to create and command it. With wars 
and standing armies and supreme executives, what of 
national liberty would we have left to live or to hope 
for ? Only separate from one another, and you will 



40 

march upon one another ; you will fight and struggle 
until your struggle reaches the point of national exis- 
tence, and then your strong foundations of freedom will 
be overthrown; the limitations and the safeguards 
which guarantee it now will be given up as a last and 
mournful sacrifice for safety ; state after state will sink 
under the ruffian rule of the camp, until some Ameri- 
can Maximin or American Alexander, conquering all, 
shall again consolidate all, and shall stamp his heel into 
that throbbing heart which beats and burns, at the 
present hour, with so pure a sense of human liberty, 
and glows with so rich a hope of renovating the people 
and the governments of the world. 

But the range and the horrors of this catastrophe do 
not terminate with ourselves; they comprehend the 
interests and the hopes, if not the fate, of other 
millions than our own, and thus involve them, in 
eminent degree, in the preservation of that bene- 
ficent bond which only can prevent it. It is a part 
of the praise and the strength and the glory of our 
country, that her hands have impelled the progress, and 
her institutions sustained all that is pure in the free 
principles, of popular revolution. If you w T ould measure 
the dignity of the demands of this national position, 
look abroad at the onward and overwhelming move- 
ment of the free or popular principle of government ; 
see it portending at this very moment, not the vast ex- 
tension merely, but per 'adventure the entire empire of 
democracy. Philosophy herself, as she calmly reads, 
upon the horoscope of nations, the shadowy presages 
of their fate, no longer recoils and disowns this ulti- 
mate result as the dream of enthusiasm. Her wisest 



41 

followers begin to assume and to avouch it as inevitable 
— begin to see and to believe, as progressive events has- 
ten to their issue, and bring into open view the parent 
causes from which they descend, that the revolutiona- 
ry movement of the day, in behalf of the popular 
principle, is no new and no startling phenomenon in 
politics, but, in truth, is a part of the most ancient 
and uniform and permanent tendency of any which 
history exhibits — a sort of providential decree, uni- 
versal, enduring, baffling all the efforts of man to check 
or to limit its control. No where, however, has this po- 
pular principle, now advancing to its just supremacy, 
ever received either full development or peaceable de- 
velopment but here, and no where either do the hopes 
or expectations of others upon this subject, turn with 
eagerness or with confidence but to us. Thus doubly 
connected, by illustration and by sympathy, with the 
progress of this great principle, our country, as a con- 
sequence, stands as a parent at the head of it, and at 
the head of all its revolutions ; responsible as a parent 
for the wisdom and the prudence which may yet be 
wanting to the full and the redeeming glories of its 
perfect triumph. It is for us, who are so proudly sta- 
tioned, and who too were gathered in our infancy from 
every people, to build up and maintain amongst our- 
selves an impregnable stronghold from which streams 
of religion and freedom and knowledge shall flow 
back again, to fertilize and to gladden the regions from 
which our fathers and our blessings came. It is for 
us to see that the banner of our republic shall wave 
over an undivided empire — an empire as unparalleled 
in its extent as in the wisdom and the justice and the 



42 

humanity of its institutions. Excelling all others in 
regulated liberty as our country does, so too let it ex- 
cel all others in holy efforts to perpetuate the felicity 
which it was raised up of Heaven to exemplify, and 
to hallow, through all time, the principles it has ren- 
dered immortal. The nations who follow in our steps, 
whose confidence and dependance rest upon us as 
their great example, call upon us to beware — to be 
true as bold. The poor and broken-hearted and down- 
trodden man, as he looks up from under the despotism 
which veils him in with its covering of cloud, pours 
forth his prayer to the Father of all, as he weeps for 
himself, that ours may be the radiant and the steady 
course which shall never bewilder or betray. And so, 
join him in his prayer that it shall be. Let the mil- 
lions of the wretched and the oppressed of all lands 
still look with certainty to us for guidance and relief; 
still stretch out their hands unto us as they stand upon 
their shores, and hail our country as the life-boat of 
liberty to the world — as the little ark which is desti- 
ned of heaven, in this latter day, to bear, for the renew- 
al of man, the choicest of its treasures through all the 
dangers of tempest and of deluge. And yet a scroll — 
a prophet's scroll of lamentations and tears and woe, 
may proclaim to the world that we too are fallen and 
gone. But smitten, crushed, crumbled into atoms 
though we may be, yet now, now, thank God we can 
never, never die We may sink as others have sunk, 
overwhelmed by that relentless and dread succession 
which sweeps whole nations to the grave ; the young 
and the bold heart of this republic, proudly as it rejoices 
in the beauty of its heritage, and the promise of its days,. 



43 

may pass away with all perishable things, but our name, 
our example, our mind, our spirit, will live forever to 
enlighten, improve, and bless the world. The spirit 
of our laws, let superstition and ignorance and power 
do what they list to destroy it, will abide upon the 
earth as the redeeming spirit of after times, and shall 
pass from hand to hand, like the inextinguishable fire 
of the Grecian temples, till all the nations be filled 
with its brightness. 

Yet immortal as it shall be, let us be instructed by 
the monitory voice that comes to us from all the re- 
cords of all the past — from every age and every land; 
and comes to tell us, that lost republics are lost forever; 
that though their spirit never dies to others, it never 
revives, when lost, to regenerate themselves. Look at 
the tiger and the reptile as they have dwelt for ages 
in the habitations of the Holy City ; look at despotism, 
worse than either, as it has nestled and brooded with 
its raven wing upon the very bosom of buried repub- 
lics, and be warned of that mysterious doom — that 
evident ordination from on high, which connects, in 
eternal fellowship, the privileges with the punishments 
of nations, which never allots the highest blessings 
but side by side with the heaviest woes. Be warned 
by this fated conjunction to put away all passion and 
parricide from amongst us — to gather and press to the 
side of your country — to heal the chafings and the 
wounds of her spirit by the fervour and the unity of 
yours — to sacrifice and to suffer when need be, that she 
may neither sorrow nor perish ; and if there be a curse 
in all the land, let it abide for the overwhelming of 
him who cometh not up to succour, to defend, and to 



44 

save. Yes, for the overwhelming of him and such as 
him, for where, under providence, but upon the heart 
— the constant and devoted heart — where but upon 
the patriotism and the virtue of her sons is the coun- 
try to rely against the corruption of her own mighty 
elements of good into mighty engines of evil. I call 
upon you then, as you would cling to that country, and 
would bear her onward in her great career, that you 
cherish these sacred principles, the very life-blood of 
her peace as well as of her faculties and her hopes. 
Such and so fervent be your devotion to her welfare 
as that which glowed in the heart of the younger Pitt, 
and of our own Adams, who, in the midst of their 
agonies, forgot not the countries they had lived for, but 
mingled with the spasms and the sorrows of the dying 
hour, a last and imploring appeal to the Parent of 
mercies, that he would remember, in eternal blessings, 
the land of their birth. Such be your devotion as that 
of the young enthusiast of Paris, who, listening to Mi- 
rabeau, in one of his noble vindications of human 
rights, and seeing him fall from his stand, dying, as the 
physician proclaimed, for want of blood, rushed to the 
spot, bared his arm for the lancet, and cried again and 
again with impassioned utterance, " take it — oh; take 
it from me — let me die, so that Mirabeau and the liber- 
ties of my country may not perish." 

I shall be pardoned, I trust, by this audience, already 
taxed too long, for introducing, in connexion with this 
view of a patriot's duty, and as an appropriate appen- 
dage to it, a closing remark upon an all-engrossing and 
all-pervading subject, which deeply, intensely, and 
sternly involves it — a subject which, though it takes 



45 

hold more immediately and more totally of the pecu- 
liar interests and structure of southern population, yet? 
in its final issues, interweaves itself indissolubly with 
the peace and the hopes and the destinies of us all. If 
it is ever important to consider it with admonitory re- 
ference to its inevitable and its dread results, it is at this 
moment, above all others the most important, whilst the 
public mind is ruminating upon it, and before any vio- 
lent or any irrevocable act has thrust it out from the 
forum of reason, to be discussed and decided upon the 
field of battle. It is now, if ever, when a threatening 
frown scowls and lowers upon its front, that evidence 
should be heard, lest an unwary judgment should let 
loose the sword to "slay the man that is thy fellow." 
Who here that asks — who here that needs to be told that 
abolition is the subject meant ; that subject of monster 
omen, though perchance of pious birth — which fostered 
and forwarded with a wild and explosive energy, has 
been made to tower above every interest of party, and 
above every measure of policy, by putting into contest 
the very body and being of the state. Passing by the 
questions of theology and morals and constitutional 
power and private right which have been embodied 
with this subject, I have this only to say which my 
southern position, and, therefore, my keener apprehen- 
sion, both as witness and victim of all its results, will 
enable me to say — that if it be pushed onward by those 
who are locally foreign to its interests and its dangers, 
until it becomes the efficient and admitted cause of 
some insurgent ebullition, it will be the parent, not 
only of unutterable calamities to us, but of certain, 
irretrievable and bloody undoing to themselves and to 



46 

all. Let those amongst you who choose, bewail the 
existence of slavery as a maelstrom in the bosom of 
southern society, if they but touch it with pragmatical, 
with forbidden and infatuated hand, they render it a 
maelstrom to engulph the Union. Be adjured, there- 
fore, by the weal of this and of coming ages ; by our 
own and our childrens' good — by all that we have and 
all that we hope for in the glories of our land, to leave 
this subject of slavery, with every accountability it 
may impose, every remedy it may require, every accu- 
mulation of difficulty or of pressure it may reach — 
leave it all to the interest and the wisdom and the 
conscience of those upon whom the providence of 
God and the constitution of your country have cast it. 
Leave it to them now and forever, and stop, before stop 
is impossible, the furious headway of that destructive 
and mad philanthropy which is lighting up for the 
nation itself the fires of the stake, which is rushing on, 
stride after stride, to a strife and a woe that may bury 
us all under a harder and wickeder slavery than any 
it would extinguish. Nothing but bitterness — noth- 
ing but aggravation of heart and of lot has been 
brought upon that unfortunate man whom rash and 
pernicious attempts — the promptings of this blinded 
and baleful spirit — have been put forth to benefit. 
They have broken down the footing he had reached, 
crushed the sympathies he had won, embarassed and 
accursed the fortunes they were interposed to control. 
The generous and elevating influence of our free insti- 
tutions was relaxing his bondage, bettering his condi- 
tion, lifting up his character, turning upon him the 
public anxieties and the public councils as a great 



47 

object of provident and public provision — was changing 
at all points the aspects of his fate, when a spirit, 
sent of heaven as it insanely imagined, came from 
abroad, to scourge him with demon visitation; to 
wrench him from the arms of his only true and only 
capable benefactors — to throw him back again upon 
the earth a thousand fold more suspected and more 
separated than before ; rivetting upon him every fet- 
ter it would loosen — poisoning every blessing it would 
bestow, and filling his whole case with elements of 
hopelessness, explosion and evil, which the heart sor- 
rows whilst it shudders to think upon. Why, then, 
persist? Why abet the growth or the daring or the 
power of a spirit which wisdom and mercy plead to 
you with all their tongues, to silence and to stop? 
Will any daughter in this assembly, the cherished and 
defended of a parent's love, blessed to the uttermost 
with the holy peace of perfect security — sheltered to 
the uttermost from the apprehension and the approach 
of every wrong, with no enemy to dread — no hand to 
injure — no terror to affright — safe in her repose, safe 
in her innocence at every hour and in every place — 
will she do that, which, all-valueless for its objects, will 
yet be all-powerful to send wakefulness and watching 
and danger and anguish, perchance, to the days and 
the nights — to the summer shade as well as to the 
barred and bolted chamber of her southern sister ? 
Will any mother here, as she soothes her infant to its 
rest, and looks upon its balmy sleep, and pressing it to 
her heart, bows in gratitude to God for his mercies to 
her child — thanking him that its life is safe — safe from 
harm — from the hand of violence and revenge, and that 



48 

all its slumbers are guarded by a nation's power — will 
she — oh, can she, as the consequence of her acts, bear 
to behold the southern mother startling- and shudder- 
ing, at every foot fall, and at every noise which breaks 
upon the silence of the night, and flying from her pillow 
of wakefulness and wretchedness to kneel and crouch 
upon the cradle, weeping and sobbing in the agony of 
her soul over the murder and the horror that surround 
it ? Will the father and the citizen hail us and greet 
us and press us to their bosom, as better brethren and 
better men, when we shall come up with our hands all 
red and reeking with the blood they have made us 
shed ? But if not, then abjure the cause which in- 
volves the crime, and the disciples who support it. 
Friends of the slave ! they are stripping him of the 
wretched remnant of liberty he has left. Friends of 
humanity! they are cruelly and recklessly staking 
it upon means of massacre and convulsion. Friends 
of the country ! they are rapidly becoming its iron 
homicides — cleaving down its institutions with mur- 
derous hand, and tearing it limb from limb. If you 
would see the practical working of the spirit that is 
spoken of — the woe and the ruin it can occasion, go to 
the quiet and the passive slave of the south, pour your 
insurrectionary sentiments into his ear, parade the 
worst of his condition in artful and in pictured horror 
before his eye, then trace the progress of the poison — 
trace it through his murmurs, his resentment, his re- 
sistance ; his passions growing deeper and darker at 
every step, under the discipline he provokes, until an- 
ger and ulceration and agony of spirit have done their 
work, and revenge and murder have become the com- 



49 

panions of his bosom : then see him leagued and band- 
ed with others as fell and as furious as himself, the 
vulture at his heart, the dagger and the torch in his 
hand, stealing into the silent and midnight chamber, 
and standing, with horrid and uplifted weapon, over 
the parent and the child as they slumber for the blow, 
see him — let the shriek, the gasping struggle, the 
gory blade, the blazing dwelling, tell out the deed that 
is done. For one moment — one palsied moment — a 
shivering and convulsive horror seizes upon the heart 
of millions of our people — in the next, a dreadful wrath 
drives on to a dreadful retribution. But if the blood 
of our people is ever thus to stream in our dwellings, 
and ooze from the very bosom of the soil that feeds us, 
it will cry from the ground like that of Abel for ven- 
geance, vengeance against the brother hand that shed 
it, and vengeance would be had, though every drop 
that was left should be poured out in one anguished 
and dying effort to obtain it. Nothing — no nothing 
but heaven could prevent a people, so lashed up to 
frenzy by rage and suffering and wrong, from pouring 
back, upon the fields and firesides of the guilty, that 
visitation of calamity and death which had been sent 
to desolate their own. Spare us — oh, spare us the 
curse of a ruptured brotherhood, of a ruined, ruined 
country. Give up your happy and united country ; 
give it up to the madness of some factious hour, to the 
frenzy of some fanatic spirit ; let it sink overwhelmed 
in some horrible struggle of brother with brother, and 
you will recover its liberties and its blessings again, 
when the sun shall " slumber in the cloud, forgetful of 
the voice of the morning," 



50 



" When earth's cities have no sound nor tread, 
And ships are drifting with the dead, 
To shores where all is dumb," 

Here upon your northern fields it was, at some 
dark and dismaying period of our revolution, when 
army after army had been lost, when wretched and 
dispirited and beaten, the boldest quailed, the faith- 
fullest despaired, and all, for an instant, seemed to be 
conquered except the unconquerable will of our glorious 
chief: — here it was, that rising above all the auguries 
and the terrors around him, he exclaimed to the despair- 
ing of his followers as if inspired of Heaven for his 
work, " strip me of the wretched and the suffering rem- 
nant of my soldiers — take from me all I have left — leave 
me but a standard — give me but the means of plant- 
ing it upon the mountains of West Augusta, and I 
will yet draw around me the men who will lift up 
their bleeding country from the dust and set her free." 
That "West Augusta" stands here to-day pleading 
through me, who am a son, for the individual and un- 
broken heritage of Washington and his comrades. 
Loyal to the result as to the struggle of the revolution 
— devoted, as when her devotion was counted upon as 
equivalent to fate — true, as when you were grasped 
and bound to the bosom of each other in the hour of 
distress, it is her hope and her wish to finish with 
you the destinies of the nation — arm in arm to share 
with you in a common glory, and perish, when perish 
she must, only upon a common field : — thus testifying, 
through all time, to a fidelity which there was nothing 
in life that could shock, and nothing in death that 
could destroy. Turning her eye and her heart upon 



51 

no other banner than the proud one which floats from 
the capitol of the republic, she prays as she looks upon 
it with its " stars and stripes," that the glad shout 
which centuries hence may hail it in the land of the 
Pilgrims, may be echoed back from the waves of the 
Pacific Seas. Heaven grant that generations and ages 
hence, some future son of the south, honoured and 
welcomed and greeted as I have been to-day, may 
stand upon this consecrated spot, praising and thank- 
ing God, as I do, that he also can say, these are my 
brethren, and this, this too is my country. 



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